I thought it was written by Nabokov, and I thought it was called “The Spider” but I seem to be wrong on both counts, because I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
It was about a mentally ill man, who rented a room. He began to descend into schizophrenia, or at least into hallucinations. He built, or hallucinated building a web that filled his entire bedroom.
I also think that it was made into a movie in the not-too-distant past.
That’s about all my aging mind can muster. Help me Dopers!
Could it have been this movie? It sounds like an original work, not based on a book, but the preview on IMDB does show him building a web of sorts from string in his room.
Spider is a 2002 psychological thriller film produced and directed by David Cronenberg and based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Patrick McGrath, who also wrote the screenplay.
The film premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and enjoyed some media buzz; however, it was released in only a few cinemas at the year's end by distributor Sony Pictures Classics. Nonetheless, the film enjoyed much acclaim by critics and especially by Cronenberg enthusiasts. The film garnered a Best Director...
Spider: Directed by David Cronenberg. With Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave. A mentally disturbed man takes residence in a halfway house. His mind gradually slips back into the realm created by his illness, where he...
Average Rating: 6.8
Duration: 01:38
Oops, looks like it was a book: Spider by Patrick McGrath. I haven’t read it, but I’m guessing this is it.
Spider is a novel by the British novelist Patrick McGrath, originally published in the United States in 1990. In the novel, a psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator, the protagonist wrestles with mental illness and trauma from his past.
Spider, birth name Dennis Cleg, is a recent arrival from a psychiatric hospital to a halfway house in the East End of London—just a few streets away from the very house where he grew up, which was the scene of some barely visible but tremendous trau...
Doesn’t exactly mesh with your remembered details but could it be the short story The Metamorphis by Kafka?
Most recent film adaptation was in 2012, according to that wiki link.
chiroptera:
Doesn’t exactly mesh with your remembered details but could it be the short story The Metamorphis by Kafka?
Most recent film adaptation was in 2012, according to that wiki link.
I doubt it; too familiar.
FWIW, I’m not a Nabokov reader, but I did index a run of a journal dedicated to him, and this story doesn’t ring a bell.
I think it must have been this. And perhaps I conflated it with Metamorphosis.
